Common Sense Political Thought

Patterico has a top-notch story concerning The Los Angeles Times’ reporting of events in Iraq. He asks:

Is the L.A. Times reporting unconfirmed enemy propaganda from an Iraqi stringer with ties to the insurgency? Or is the paper simply misreporting the facts, and failing to seek out and report the military’s side of the story?

Patterico then devotes a good amount of space to detailing what was reported in the Times, and contrasts it with what a soldier on the ground in Ramadi said about the events, trying to determine who was giving us the real story, the Times or the soldier. Though he presented a huge preponderance of evidence which would lead the reader (and obviously, the author) to conclude that the Times had the poorer credibility, he was not able to say, conclusively, that it was the Times’ story which was false.

I can’t tell you whether it’s true that the L.A. Times is repeating propaganda from a stringer with ties to insurgents.

But I can tell you this: I don’t have the resources of the L.A. Times. Yet in my spare time from my full-time job, using widely available resources on the Web and contacts built up through blogging, I probably got a more accurate picture of what happened in Ramadi on November 13 than the paid reporter for the L.A. Times did.

In doing so, I found I learned something important about reporting from Iraq in general. Big Media journalists often rely on sources that are unreliable. They don’t tell you the pressures these sources might be under from insurgents and terrorists. They refuse to tell you who their stringers are, so we can assess their motivations. They get quotes from doctors who seem to see only civilian deaths. If the military has been given insufficient time to respond to an allegation, these journalists don’t check with the military later, to verify that the story they’ve written is accurate. And sometimes, as here, their stories are completely at odds with numerous other accounts reported in other press outlets — and they seem to have no interest in finding out why.

This, to me, is journalism so sloppy as to be unprofessional. I noted previously how Jason Leopold of TruthOut was sloppy with facts that were easily checkable. When Mr Leopold wrote:

Just ask Martha Stewart, who spent six months in a federal penitentiary, not because she was found guilty of insider trading, which is what prosecutors had initially set out to prove, but because she lied to FBI investigators when she was questioned about the circumstances surrounding her suspicious stock trades,

I thought immediately that he was wrong, that Mrs Stewart had spent only five months in prison. I was working from memory there, so the first thing I did was check the record.

Mr Leopold couldn’t get a simple a thing as Martha Stewart’s prison term correct: she spent five months in prison, not six. A simple Google search for “Martha Stewart” and “prison” turns up 794,000 returns, with her sentence very visible on the very first page. In other words, a journalist couldn’t make that mistake — unless he was just sloppy.

One of my (apparently very occasional) readers was displeased that I criticized Mr Leopold’s reporting, and I’ll admit that his (mis)reporting has drawn my attention more closely than that of others, but I’ve been writing about this for quite some time now, concerning other journalism sources, here and here and basically my entire Freedom of the Press category.

The simple fact is that far too many of today’s professional journalists are just plain sloppy; some work from (faulty) memories, some don’t take the relatively few minutes it would require to check the easily documented facts, and some work off of unreliable hearsay.

And when it comes to Iraq, the problems multiply. You have Western journalists who dare not venture outside their Green Zone hotels, and who speak little or no Arabic, relying on Iraqi “stringers,” part-time, freelance people who provide information for journalists.

Even if we are to assume that the editors and reporters for The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post and ABC News are all very fair minded, unbiased and professional men whose burning ambition in life is to provide the news in a straightforward manner, once they have to rely on stringers, the whole aspect of professionalism falls apart.

American reporters are taught in journalism school the standards to which the profession is supposed to adhere, standards for fact-checking, standards for verification, standards for accuracy and impartiality, all of the things which our great American media have claimed for themselves.

But an Iraqi stringer is just that: an Iraqi. He never attended the Columbia School of Journalism, he never worked his way up the ladder from an entry level job at The Lexington Herald-Leader, and he never even had the opportunity to admire the fair-minded journalists of our culture. Rather, he was born into a society in which journalists were tools of the state, simply another arm of propaganda, and the media were used, specifically, to get out the messages that the rulers wanted, and to help control the populace. To feed a slanted story to an American reporter sitting in a hotel bar isn’t a betrayal of the stringers’ professionalism, but a fulfillment of what he sees as a perfectly reasonable and normal function of the media: to make them serve his interests.

That the American journalists generally speak little or no Arabic, and even if they do couldn’t tell an Iraqi from a Jordanian or an Egyptian, simply makes the propaganda tasks easier.

The concept of a free and fair press is a relatively recent development, even in the United States. Nineteenth century newspapers were overtly partisan, and there are still newspapers in the United States which are called The Republican or The Democrat, even if today they at least claim to be fair and non-partisan. But such a development has yet to reach the Arab world, and we know it. Perhaps the worst fact is that so many of our mainstream media sources do know it or should know it, but still rely on sources with an agenda, because they have no other way of gathering any news at all.
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Updated: 26 November 2006 Patterico has added more evidence from “milbloggers” concerning the Ramadi “air strike” story. To put it mildly, the professionals who actually fight the war in Iraq are calling The Los Angeles Times’ story bullshit very difficult to believe.

And Curt from Flopping Aces in Getting the News From the Enemy, has gotten in on the story, making the same point I have (though with much better detail) concerning Western media using (or, more accurately, being used by) Iraqi sources of dubious veracity and intent. Curt’s story is well documented, and deserves top be read.